Fred Astaire: 1899-1987: The Great American Flyer

Elegance is usually an imposition, a set of mannerisms employed by the swells to cover their emptiness and maintain their distance from us plebeians. Fred Astaire's achievement -- no, his glory -- was that he made elegance infectious. He democratized and Americanized the word most overused to describe himself.

And he did the same thing for dancing. Before the advent of sound movies, dance for most Americans meant tap dancers "laying down iron" in vaudeville. Before Astaire, screen dance was a thundering herd of chorines tapping out a Busby Berkeley abstraction. "I didn't think I had too much of a chance,"...